Mental Health Awareness Week: what it means to us at held

This week is Mental Health Awareness Week. The theme this year is community. It feels like the right moment to introduce ourselves properly.

held opened its doors this week. Not entirely from nowhere, the building on Hazelgrove Road has been a therapy centre for twenty three years, and the practitioners who work here bring decades of experience between them. But the name is new, the energy is new, and the timing feels right.

Mental Health Awareness Week comes around every year. And every year, a lot of organisations say the right things for seven days and then go quiet. We want to be honest about that, because it matters. For us, mental health is not a week. It is the entire point.

“Therapy for real life” is our strapline, and we mean it literally. Not therapy for a crisis. Not therapy for when things have got bad enough to justify it. Therapy for the complicated, demanding, frequently overwhelming business of being a person. The things that sit unprocessed at the back of your mind. The feelings you cannot quite name. The roles you are trying to hold together, parent, partner, colleague, son or daughter, all at once, all the time, with very little space to stop and think.

—

This year’s theme is community, and it resonates with everything we are trying to build.

There is a reason the saying goes that it takes a village to raise a child. We are not built to do things alone. We need to belong somewhere, to feel connected, to have people around us who know us in different ways. For Gavin Demurger-Jones, held’s Counsellor and Centre Director, that means the parents at the school gate, the local cricket club, the neighbours, the fellow dog walkers. “Being connected into my community helps me be the therapist I need to be,” he says. “It helps me be the parent, the husband, the son. All of these roles need me to be present. And that connectivity makes that possible.”

The same is true for therapists themselves. A well-supported therapist supports their clients well. Part of what held is building is a community of practitioners who are not working in isolation, who feel part of something, who have people around them who understand the particular demands of this work. Because the support flows both ways.

And we want to be part of the wider community too. Not just a digital presence. Real people, on the high street, in the town, in Mid Sussex.

—

If you are struggling this week and you are not sure what to do with that, here is what Gavin suggests.

Find someone to talk to. Not necessarily a therapist, not necessarily anyone with any training at all. Just someone who might give you the space to think out loud, to say the things that have not been processed yet, to talk about what you do not know the answer to. “It could be a colleague, a friend, your boss,” he says. “It could even be your dog. Just say it out loud. Sometimes getting it out of your head is enough.” And if that person is not there right now, the Samaritans are. Always. Their number is 116 123 and it is free.

If things feel heavier than that, we are here. held has a broad team of experienced therapists across a range of specialisms, and getting in touch is straightforward. You fill in a short form, and we take it from there.

—

We are new, and we are just getting started. But this building has been holding people for twenty three years. We are not stopping now.

Get in touch at heldtherapy.space. If you are in crisis or need to talk to someone today, the Samaritans are available any time on 116 123.